Limbs of the Fawn

• Track Listing

LHD 'Limbs of the Fawn' CD Burning in hell with no relief. LHD is: Phil Blankenship, John Wiese Los Angeles harsh city crust. Reviews: the Wire number 271 Yet another dispatch from the bottomless crucible of John Wiese, this time in collaboration with fellow Californian Phil Blankenship, aka The Cherry Point. The packaging- a black digipak bearing an eldritch grey inscription- evokes both Keiji Haino's none-more-black aesthetic and Metallica's commercial breakthrough, 1991's self-titled 'black album'. Those are perhaps valid reference points for LHD's unsettling dead channel fuzz-storm, but Wiese and Blankenship trounce both in terms of desperate heaviness and frostbitten anomie. Superficially this is a vicious, face-ripping skree, bit on closer inspection one becomes aware of the dynamic between the two artists as their sheets of noise compete, overlap and enfold each other before splitting off and returning for another onslaught. The furious crackle of distortion that swathes this single 36 minute track operates as something of a red herring. Listen deep into it's outwardly tempestuous void and it's possible to detect vamps, riffs, and even melodies in the non-stop barrage. It may be the hallucinatory properties of Wiese and Blankenship's collective sound, but the more suggestible may even begin to 'hear' human voices through the tempest. Like much of Wiese's work in particular, Limbs of the Fawn has an ectoplasmic quality conducive to manifestations of the unearthly, it's ferocity seemingly in direct proportion to it's authors; desire for gnosis. While it may be fanciful to suggest he'll ever achieve this aim, it's thrilling to observe his progress. - Joseph Stannard.